I’ve been in mourning for the last week, which is why I haven’t written anything about this before now. I mourned Trayvon’s death when it happened. This last week, I’ve been mourning the death of justice in America.

I’m not judging the jury in the trial of George Zimmerman. They were given a terribly difficult job, given the constraints placed on them by the legal system. However, I do wish that at least one of them had found it within themselves to say, as did Mr. Bumble in Dickenson’s Oliver Twist, “Then the law is an ass,” and simply refused as a matter of conscience to go along with acquitting Zimmerman. In that case, at least, there would have been a “hung jury,” and he would have more time to contemplate his actions and the potential consequences.

Regardless of the verdict however, I think — I hope and pray — that we can all agree that something is very wrong when a young man walking through a neighborhood on the way back from a trip to the store can be profiled, stalked and shot to death when he had done absolutely nothing wrong, and yet no one is legally accountable for his death. Something is very wrong.

I think that George Zimmerman was wrong, morally and ethically wrong, to look at this young man’s skin color and style of dress and determine on that basis that Trayvon constituted a threat that he needed to confront with deadly force. That’s just wrong. And this morally wrong behavior resulted in Trayvon’s death at his hand. It seems to me that the law should come down on the side of holding him accountable for his morally wrong behavior resulting in an unnecessary and unjustified killing.

“Wait a minute”, some might interject here, “the killing was justified because Trayvon attacked Zimmerman causing him to fear for his life.” That was, apparently, the argument of the defense, which caused the jury to deliver a verdict of “not guilty.”

I am writing this essay in an effort to understand the passions of many gun-rights advocates in this country – passions I find quite terrifying.

In trying to understand the outrage of some at efforts to pass gun-control legislation, I have come to think of “the gun” as an “anti-sacrament” – not so much the actual gun one might possess or want to buy, but the symbolic gun that pervades thinking and provokes passions.

For Christians, sacraments are ritual actions involving physical things like water, bread and wine – actions which evoke a sense of safety and salvation because they embody a narrative about what really hurts us (evil and sin) and what really heals (God’s love, grace, and assurance).

Their ritualized repetition enacts a story about what we should fear and resist, and also about what we most need for help and hope. In the contemporary gun debate, it often seems that those resisting any infringement on gun rights are held captive by a different story about fear and hope – fear of governments and other threatening powers, of criminals and intruders and strangers, of the dangerous and unexpected. And they hope in self-reliance and self-defense, in “our way of life” and the possession of guns.

In this latter narrative, perhaps especially by ritualized repetition at rallies and protests, the gun becomes a kind of sacrament – a symbolic or sacred object that embodies a pervasive sense of what threatens and what protects and saves. I call it an “anti-sacrament” because its narrative distorts realistic fears and hopes to such a degree that it produces an illusory but absolute sense of both evil and salvation – and thereby contributes to even more real evil and much less actual safety.

I write as someone who has never owned a gun, but once had a typical American boy’s fascination with them. (I allowed my son to indulge that fascination at age 13 with a pellet gun – something he himself chose never to touch again after he killed a chipmunk with a lucky shot.) Thus I write from ignorance about the hunting culture that grew from the necessity of food and to become today an ecological necessity.

I admit as well to some ignorance about our cultures of security – the world of police and military and others recruited to “serve and protect.” I have no insider understanding of these cultures. I accept their necessity, yet view them with wariness and studied skepticism.

I write as someone who thinks that most proposed gun-control legislation simply makes common sense, that the 2nd Amendment’s meaning has been distorted beyond recognition by its supposed defenders, and that the most powerful opposition to gun control comes from those who profit most – manufacturers and dealers and the propaganda they hire.

As Mitt Romney’s would-be presidential bus careened up and down America’s roads and cable channels this past year, U.S. Catholic bishops took over the tail gunner seats. The bishops directed much of their fire at President Obama — not just his candidacy, but his morality.

The bishops claimed that Obama was so closely associated with intrinsic evil that a vote for him was itself intrinsically evil. You could be a Democrat and vote for Obama, or you could be a faithful Catholic. You could not be both.

The U.S. Bishops Portrayal of Obama as Evil

The bishops’ attacks on Obama were personal, orchestrated, heavily-funded, ubiquitous and frequently hateful. The basic message — Obama is evil — was scripted centrally with the bishops’ political advisers and political partners. The message was then delivered from pastors’ pulpits, parish bulletins and church-usher handouts, diocesan newspaper columns and full-page secular Sunday newspaper political ads, from YouTube videos, Fox News interviews, complaints filed in federal courts, C-Span televised congressional committee appearances, and a national novena spectacle — the “Fortnight for Freedom Campaign.”

The bishops’ Fortnight featured the medieval Roman Catholic heroism of Thomas More, Henry VIII’s lord chancellor. Never mind that More spent a significant part of his English political career torturing and putting people to death, particularly Lutherans, who had sought to reform various Roman Catholic practices and preaching, such as the sale of indulgences. Set them afire after tying them to stakes. To More, the “reformers” were heretics. If you were More (or Augustine or Aquinas), that’s what you did with heretics. You put them to death. Nonetheless, U.S. bishops presented More as their modern model of Heroic Religious Freedom.

Accusations of Obama’s evilness came from a broad range of the U.S. episcopacy. Several Catholic bishops repeatedly portrayed Obama’s political beliefs as Stalin-like, Hitler-like, satanically connected, “intrinsically evil” and anti-Catholic. Obama was a man whose political purposes would inevitably bring about the physical martyrdom of our bravest bishops.

Some independent Catholic journals and writers objected to the bishops’ tactics. There was no report of any bishop objecting.

There have been no apologies. Instead, bishops are now telling Catholics who voted for Obama that they have been morally complicit in the re-election of this evil president. Catholics who voted for Obama have been promised remedial evangelization.

In the United States, bishops have every legal right to politically evangelize in the public square as well as in the cathedral plaza. But not everything legal is moral. There is deep immorality in using evangelization tactics that are dominated by political character assassination, by political lies. What can be worse than being defined as “intrinsically evil,” depraved to your very core.

Some journalists predict that the bishops’ Stalin, Hitler, “intrinsic evil” poisons will remain in the bloodstream of the body politic long after the election.

Indeed, President Obama’s post-Aurora, post-Newtown, post-election call for regulatory and legislative gun control changes are being fought with rhetoric that mimics the bishops’ tactics. Obama’s efforts to reduce gun violence are Hitler-like and Stalin-like. Obama is like Saddam Hussein and Hugo Chavez. Obama wants to take away gun owners’ sacred Second Amendment rights, just as he wants to take away Catholic employers’ sacred First Amendment right to deny their women employees’ contraceptive health insurance choices.

While the bishops could not give Romney an electoral victory, their tactics did deliver to him a significant majority of the votes of white Catholics, particularly older white men. The growing alliance between the bishops’ dominant Catholic voting bloc and white evangelical Southern voters is not a relationship that bodes well for racial or ethnic minorities, or for women.

Those who will oppose Obama’s income tax reforms, health care reforms, immigration reform, war and peace policies, gun violence reform, economic and social justice policies, same sex marriage reforms — those people will benefit greatly from the bishops’ characterization of Obama as evil. Having lost the election to him, many of Obama’s political opponents will do whatever it takes to defeat his presidency— the same policy that the Republican party leadership boasted about in 2008. Those politics are both fathered and fed by the bishops’ ancient tactic — what good can come out of someone so evil?

So, there is miserable irony here. The key moral story of the 2012 elections is the Catholic bishops’ collective, shameful and toxic immorality.

I recently heard the head of the National Rifle Association say: “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Really? Does he really believe that?

From a religious point of view, such a statement seems to me somewhat heretical at the very least, if not idolatrous. The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun? If someone believes that, then they believe that a gun is the only thing ensuring that good will prevail, in which case the gun is their god.

A gun does not and cannot ensure that good will prevail. It does help one to understand the hysteria around the prospect of having your god — I mean your gun — confiscated.

If like me, however, you do NOT believe that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun– or suspect that a good guy with a gun might possibly even make a situation more dangerous, depending on how much training she or he has — it might leave you pondering the relative pros and cons of having a gun. Once it is established that the gun is not god, then one can consider if there are other, perhaps better ways, through which God can work and good prevail.

I do believe in the right of individuals to possess guns in order to protect themselves, their families and their homes. That doesn’t mean I approve of it — it just means I acknowledge their right to do so. I guess that makes me a supporter of the Second Amendment. Does that mean that I believe in the right to own and carry any kind of weapon I choose whenever and wherever I choose? Of course not. A constitutional right is not an absolute, unequivocal right.

The Constitution is not the Word of God either. None of our constitutional rights is absolute and unconditional — not free speech, not the right of assembly, not freedom of religion. We place restrictions — and always have — on all of those rights. These restrictions are determined through our democratic process not to violate the spirit of the Constitution.

Where is your moral compass pointing? What are your social values? Hark will explore faith, morals, ethics and character at the intersection of religion ethics, culture, politics, media, science, education, economics and philosophy. At times this blog will alert readers to breaking news and trends. At times it will attempt to look more deeply into intriguing subjects. Hark means to listen attentively, and we will, as readers talk back to the news.